Tuesday, January 24, 2017

The “elective affinities”
between the Venezuelan government’s official conspiracy rhetoric and President
Trump’s claims of a media and financial conspiracy against him are hard to
miss. President
Maduro has said he opposes “the hate campaign against Donald Trump we are seeing
around the world. (…) I ask myself, why [this campaign], because that’s something
we know a lot about, dirty wars.” Maduro also says that he
hopes that Venezuela-US relation will improve under Trump.

Venezuela’s official
media is
still very critical about Trump, but some articles
are being published hinting at how he may also be the victim of the same
types of conspiracies by the media and the “financial elites” the Venezuelan
government constantly claims as common enemies. Opinion articles in the
critical chavista portal Aporrea have
however been overwhelmingly critical of a possible rapprochement between Maduro
and Trump under the naïve assumption that they may both be the victims of the
same conspiracy. (Read examples here and here.)

But the pro-chavista web page Misión Verdad has
published an article titled “Who
funded the women’s march against Trump.” The piece accuses Philanthropist
George Soros of being behind this attempt to “undermine Trump’s presidency.”
Wider conspiracy links are also mentioned as part of a plot against Trump.

“George Soros is
known around the world for his economic power and for his links with the United
States [gringa] politics. He is also
known for funding –through his NGOs- the 2014 violent revolts in Ukraine, which
led to a coup d’état. Precisely because of this, and because of the links
between George Soros and the Democratic Party, President Vladimir Putin has
warned Trump that [Soros] is preparing an Ukrainian style coup d’état [in the
United States].”

Hillary Clinton is of
course part of this conspiracy. The evidence is that she twitted in favor of the
event:

“Hillary Clinton politically
capitalized from the event via Twitter, thus showing that George Soros, and the
political and financial elite that act against Trump, are betting on all those initiatives,
in all fronts, that could undermine his presidency.”

Friday, January 13, 2017

Eight suspects of
having participated in the so called “Blue Coup” plot have
been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 8 years by a military
court. The condemned are three civilians and five Air Forces officers.

In February 13, 2015,
President Maduro announced he had “dismantled” a coup attempt against his
government. He first referred to the plan as “Jericho Operation,” but the name
later changed to “Blue Coup” in government media.

The conspiracy, according
to Maduro, included opposition leaders and active Air Force officers. The
plan was to bomb the presidential Miraflores palace, the Ministry of the Defense,
and the offices of the news channel Telesur using Air Force Tucano type planes. PSUV leader Disodado
Cabello accused opposition leaders Antonio Ledezma and Julio Borges of being
behind the plot. The
government also accused most leaders of opposition parties, including
Capriles Radonski, of having at least knowledge of the plot. Ledezma was
arrested on February 19 and is still under house arrest.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

On January 8 President Maduro announced the creation of a new Anti-coup Special Command for
Peace and Sovereignty –the name later changed to Anti-coup National Command.
According to Maduro this new body will “take preventive, legal, and corrective
measures against the coupist sectors.”

On January 11, El Aissami announced the arrest of an opposition deputy, Gilbert Caro, on charges of planning “terrorist actions in the
country.” According to the Vice-president, Caro carried inside his car an AK47
rifle and plastic explosives. Aissami explained that Caro had plans to
assassinate opposition leaders and then blame the government.

Caro is a deputy of
the National Assembly for the Voluntad
Popular party. He served a 10 year prison sentence for drug trafficking
crimes he claims he didn’t commit. Diosdado Cabello declared that “Caro seems to
miss prison, he was obviously not re-educated [while in prison].”

Sunday, January 1, 2017

In a surprising rhetorical
move, Ignacio Ramonet, a Spanish journalist close to chavismo and former editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique, argues that a sign that we live in a “post-truth”
era is that some people do not accept
the obvious fact that the Venezuelan government is the victim of a conspiracy.

Conspiracy theorists
commonly refute their critics by accusing them of also being part of the conspiracy
or of being “official conspiracy theorists,” but this must be one of the first
times the new term “post-truth” is used by a conspiracy theorist to characterize
the sceptics’ “post-factual relativism.”

All this in the context of a long duration media war against
Caracas which began with Hugo Chávez arrival to power in 1999, and which has
intensified since April 2013. It reached unheard of levels of violence after
the election of President Nicolás Maduro.

This atmosphere of permanent and aggressive media harassment,
of insidious misinformation about Venezuela, has confused even many of the
friends of the Bolivarian Revolution. Especially because, in this “post-truth”
era, the practice of lying, the intellectual fraud, and shameless deception is
not punished by any negative consequence, not in terms of credibility or loss
of image. Anything goes, everything is useful in this “era of post-factual relativism,”
and not even the most objective facts are taken into consideration. Not even
the arguments of plots and conspiracies –which are so obvious in the Venezuelan
case, - are accepted. Beforehand, the dominant media discourse characterizes and
denounces the “supposed plots” as the unacceptable arguments of an “old
narrative”…

Ramonet devotes the rest
of his piece to praising President Maduro for his “audacity”, “firm hand”, “creativity”,
and “courage”, and for through “a sequence of masterful chess plays nobody could
foretell,” defeating at least ten
conspiracies during 2016. All post-factually true…